Dashboard and scorecard technologies aggregate specific data into a single portal to let IT and business users quickly gauge the effect of interrelated events and take corrective action.

The report, which is based on a winter 2006 survey of corporate IT professionals, BI consultants, and business sponsors/users, identifies numerous trends found in recent dashboard and scorecard deployments.

The report says that dashboards and scorecards are still in their infancy, with most supporting fewer than 50 users and maintaining less than 50 GB of data. It also points out that many organizations report that they haven't spent a lot of money on dashboard/scorecard deployment. While still in its infancy, many IT managers are looking to dashboards to help them evaluate enterprise performance.

The report said that vendors, such as FineGround, HP and Verizon, are also putting out applications to enable users compile performance metrics into a real-time window more efficiently.

In its report, TDWI has warned though that inexpensive dashboard tools may provide short-term results, but after a successful initial deployment within the organisation, "the inevitable need to increase the scale of your dashboard will require significant additional time and investment."

The report is based on the results of a survey of 689 business intelligence and data warehousing professionals, as well as industry interviews. The majority of the respondents were corporate IT professionals (58%). The remainder were BI consultants (22%) and business sponsors/users (17%). The majority of responses came from the United States (62%) and Europe (15%).

The TDWI is a worldwide association of data warehousing and business intelligence professionals